Overview

This project was completed over the course of three ​weeks in pursuit of Dr. Kim Sydow Campbell’s ​Digital Literacies graduate course. My teammate and I ​created a proof-of-concept deliverable that featured ​structured and reusable content published to PDF and ​HTML outputs. The content was authored and ​managed in oXygen XML Author. The screenshot on ​the right shows the topics within oXygen XML.

The global content strategy firm Content Rules ​subcontracted my team to create a proof-of-concept ​for their fictitious client, XYZ Hospitals.

The original content was a PDF titled “XYZ Hospital ​Policies and Procedures”.

We edited all topics into structured content using a ​topic-based authoring approach and

Heretto’s Information Model, specifically referring to ​the following DITA information types:

• Task: A procedure to help users complete a desired ​task or reach a specific goal.
  
• Reference: A resource such as a glossary, list, or ​table.
  
• Concept: An overview of a subject or an ​explanation of a process or system.
  

We created new structured topic templates that ​included our new styles for each information type to ​help the team apply these standards across topics. The ​structuring process including rewriting and ​reorganizing topics, breaking down large topics, ​adding auto-generated metadata, and noting content ​for reuse across the Policies and Procedures Manual.

Goals

The goals of implementing a single-source solution were to:

• update content once across all related products and publications
  
• make content searchable online
  
• produce print for those customers who want it
  
• create consistency across the different content creators/approvers ​who own different parts of the related products
  
• personalize print content for different customers and product ​versions when possible
  

Our hope with this proof-of-concept project was to provide as many ​solutions as possible within our three-week timeline.

Approach

Content Inventory/Audit

We started this project by importing the content provided into oXygen XML. The first step of creating structured content required a content audit to determine the subset of content we believed would be most beneficial for XYZ Hospitals to structure. For this proof-of-concept, my teammate and I selected topics from the manual we felt will be accessed frequently, such as “Reporting Violence and Abuse”, “Emergency Plans”, and “Patient/Office Safety.” We focused on refactoring and improving 54 topics from these areas.

Information Grouping

Our team then moved onto information grouping by categorizing the content into three principal topics: task, concept, or reference. We created a content model. shown in the table shown to the right, to input topic classification and metadata (such as keywords and tags) for each topic. During this phase, we also identified content that could be used for potential re-use.

Outcome

The proof-of-concept letter (linked below) outlines how using a content management system like oXygen XML can provide a single-source solution for their content needs.

Software Used

oXygen XML

MS Teams